Ideas of Education

Philosophy and politics from Plato to Dewey

Christopher Brooke, Elizabeth Frazer, Christopher Brooke, Elizabeth Frazer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415582520
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136729898
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

There has always been a strong relationship between education and philosophy - especially political philosophy. Renewed concern about the importance and efficacy of political education has revived key questions about the connections between the power to govern, and the power to educate. Although these themes are not always prominent in commentaries, political writings have often been very deeply concerned with both educational theory and practice. This invaluable book will introduce the reader to key concepts and disputes surrounding educational themes in the history of political thought.

The book draws together a fascinating range of educational pioneers and thinkers from the canon of philosophers and philosophical schools, from Plato and Aristotle, down to Edward Carpenter and John Dewey, with attention along the way paid to both individual authors like Thomas Hobbes and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as to intellectual movements, such as the Scottish Enlightenment and the Utopian Socialists. Each thinker or group is positioned in their historical context, and each chapter addresses the structure of the theory and argument, considering both contemporaneous and current controversies. A number of themes run throughout the volume:

• an analysis of pedagogy, socialisation, schooling and university education, with particular relation to public and private life, and personal and political power
• references to the historical and intellectual context
• an overview of the current reception, understanding and interpretation of the thinker in question
• the educational legacy of the theories or theorists.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of education, as well as students and teachers of political theory, the history of political thought, and social and political philosophy.

1 Socrates, Plato, erôs, and liberal education

Mark L. McPherran

Introduction

Although modern educators and educational theorists often credit Socrates and Plato for their ground-breaking contributions to educational methods, theory, and reform, they often misunderstand them. They also commonly relegate them to the history of education, rather than seeing them as still relevant to the theory and practice of teaching at secondary and post-secondary levels. This is understandable, especially if one has some understanding of the current state of secondary and post-secondary teacher education.¹

There are several useful outlines of the nature and uses of Socrates’ (469–399 BCE) notorious ‘Socratic Method’ – and many contemporary discussions of the logical side of its several puzzling aspects.² There are also several good outlines of Plato’s (428/427–348/347 BCE) educational theory – especially as it is deployed in his portrait of the perfect city in his Republic.³ In this paper, I want to focus on a more neglected topic, namely, the non-logical, psychologically-astute pedagogical methods of Socrates, mentioning briefly what Plato did with that inheritance.

It has been said that the first axiom of Socratic teaching is ‘Start where the students are’ (Swardson, 2005, p. 178). Given where some students really are these days, however, this will strike some of us as a very challenging invitation. For although Aristotle (384–322 BCE) may have been right in his own time and place that ‘It is easy to get starting points with men of good upbringing’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk I, 1095b7-8), such points are now harder to find in the post-everything era of the present – even among the very best of the breed. For although undergraduates may not actually believe that four-sided triangles exist, some very bright ones are nevertheless willing to assert that very possibility until one can per impossibile prove otherwise. Others seem not to have any committed beliefs on philosophical topics to appeal to in discussion. So even though the Socratic method – the elenchos – is frequently presented as a relatively theory-free teaching device, suitable for use in all disciplines from art to law to engineering as a way of testing student knowledge claims, it needs always to be recognised that its subjects must at least possess a commitment to the law of non-contradiction for the game to even get going. Moreover, the effective use of the elenchos requires a full consideration of the psychological, cultural, and ethical factors surrounding the relationship between the elenchos-wielder and his or her interlocutor.

Socrates and his methods

One of the best and most time-honoured ways to approach such topics is to turn to the fountainhead of the elenchos: Socrates, as represented to us by Plato. In such dialogues as the Charmides and Gorgias, for example, we find Socrates operating as a subtle diagnostician of Charmides’ (446–403 BCE) attraction to intemperance and Callicles’ (450/445–404/403 BCE) attraction to tyrannical hedonism, as part of his inquiry into the nature of the virtues. Indeed, Socrates’ examinations are portrayed as being so attentive to the specific characteristics of each individual interlocutor that Socrates and Plato have been credited with being the inventors of scientific verbal psychotherapy, beside whom ‘Gorgias [485–380 BCE] and Antiphon [479–411 BCE] are mere prehistory’ (Entralgo, 1970, p. 137; cf. p. 126). However, once we begin to study the methods of Plato’s Socrates we must confront a host of puzzles generated by the way Socrates relates his elenctic method to a revolutionary moral theory, and to his equally revolutionary religious commitments. Modern sensibilities can likewise be disconcerted by Socrates’ seemingly antidemocratic tendencies, and by his disingenuous and cruel use of shame, irony and erôs in the pursuit of his therapeutic, educational mission.⁴ Modern educators must ask themselves: Ought we really to risk the ire of the Dean, let alone law suits and so on, in order to model ourselves as modern day Socrateses grilling and publicly humiliating our own reluctant Alcibiadeses (451–404 BCE)?⁵

I wish here to explore briefly several of these puzzles and difficulties in an attempt to begin to locate the nature and place of Socratic and Platonic pedagogical methods and their use of erôs as they might be deployed in the modern classroom. It was Socrates who allegedly ‘first called philosophy down from the sky’ (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 5.4.10) by investigating not the nature of the physical cosmos, but rather, the human virtues of courage, temperance, piety, justice, and wisdom, and their contribution to human happiness, human flourishing; that is, eudaimonia.

The basic elements of Socrates’ revolutionary moral theory (later developed by Plato, Aristotle and others) can be summarised like this:

1 Every kind of creature desires/aims by nature to achieve that kind’s particular good (e.g., acorns ‘aim to be’ successful oak trees).

2 Thus, every person aims to achieve the human good for him or herself (every person desires to be an agathôs; a good, successful person).

3 A person is not his or her body, but is, rather, a soul (psuchê) = a rational mind (nous).

4 The human good is eudaimonia (‘happiness’ in an objective sense; human flourishing, ‘success’ – ‘being well’ and ‘doing well’). All other goals such as health and wealth are subordinate at best and only insofar as they promote eudaimonia (they are not what eudaimonia consists in).

5 The means to the human good are the virtues (aretai: ‘excellences’); the canonical virtues being: courage, temperance, piety, justice, and wisdom.

6 The virtues are kinds of craft-knowledge (of how to produce virtuous actions).

7 Knowledge of the virtues is best obtained by means of philosophising (beginning with the elimination of the conceit that one already has such knowledge when one does not).

8 Thus, the happiest life belongs to the philosopher.

The philosophising mentioned in item (7) most closely associated with Plato’s Socrates is the elenchos. The general pattern of an elenchos is roughly this:

1 the advancement of a moral proposition p by some interlocutor,

2 prodded by Socrates, the interlocutor admits that he or she holds moral propositions q and r,

3 through the assistance of Socrates, the interlocutor concedes that q and r entail not-p,

4 whereupon Socrates claims that p has been shown inconsistent with the interlocutor’s belief-set and

5 hence, that the interlocutor does not have the expertise that led him or her to advance thesis p as something that they know as a matter of their expertise (see, e.g., Euthyphro, 7a-8b; G. 475a-d).

There is no clear scholarly consensus on how Socrates’ method was actually supposed to work – whether it is as negative as this summary implies, whether it is more positive than that, or whether, actually, there can be said to be any such thing as ‘the Socratic method’ or, rather, whether Socrates’ questioning of his interlocutors was not always ad hoc and not ‘methodical’ at all.

Whatever the correct account of the elenctic method might be, we have no reason to believe that Socrates was the first to use it. He was preceded by other thinkers in cultivating the systematic use of the procedure. That explains why, when Aristotle assessed Socrates’ contributions to the development of philosophical methodologies, he did not mention the elenchos per se as a Socratic innovation but picked out instead Socrates’ introduction of the search for definitions of universal ethical terms and inductive or epagogic argumentation (arriving at a general claim by adducing examples) (Metaphysics, 1078b). Plato and Xenophon (430–354 BCE) also focus on epagogic reasoning as an innovative, distinguishing mark of Socratic methodology when they have Socrates’ interlocutors complain that Socrates prattles on far too much about ‘his favorite topics’ (Memorabilia, 1.2.37) – blacksmiths, cobblers, cooks, physicians and other such banal craftspeople – in order to generate and test general analogical principles concerning the alleged craft of virtue (McPherran, 2007).

This overall approach to ethics has been both criticised and defended by recent commentators. In this article I aim to respond critically to these controversies in a way that will help us to appreciate more fully the groundbreaking and perennially relevant aspects of Socratic and Platonic teaching, beyond their mere logical forms.⁶

Socrates, and other ancient philosophers’ positions can be characterised as ‘eudaimonistic’, meaning that philosophical analyses and understandings, and ethical decisions and conduct, should be both justified and explained by reference to human flourishing (or ‘happiness’). This position can be criticised in the same way that modern consequentialism can – it can be said to suffer from the flaw of ‘ethical egoism’. That is to say, it implies the general rule that one ought to take one’s own self-interests as the overriding guide in one’s moral decision-making (Vlastos, 1991, p. 177). Against this, though, Socrates can also be interpreted as not endorsing any such egoistical, self-serving point of view. After all, the argument goes, in Socrates’ case it was piety, not eudaimonistic reasoning or justification that motivated and explained his own philosophising and teaching (Vlastos, 1991, p. 177). According to his own account, as told by Plato in the Apology, he received a report that the Delphic oracle had said that ‘Socrates is the wisest of the Athenians’, and it is for this reason that he became a ‘street philosopher’, buttonholing and deflating the presumptions of all those interlocutors who laid claim to exact knowledge of the virtues (Apology, 20e-23b). Socrates had already arrived at a partial definition of piety according to which it involves not so much close attention to the correct performance of religious rituals as to serving the gods by improving the state of our souls by means of philosophising. Since piety as a virtue is then a means to the personal end we all seek – namely eudaimonia – then we serve ourselves even by serving others just insofar as we labour to improve their own intellectual grasp of the virtues, and thus, their own possession of eudaimonia (McPherran, 1996).

This is a plausible interpretation of the story. However, I do not believe it is sufficient either to square eudaimonistic reasoning with piety and refute an egotistical account, or as a complete account of Socratic philosophy and education. It must be acknowledged that in the Apology Socrates certainly tells the story this way. An overly-enthusiastic Chaerephon went to the Delphic Oracle to ask if anyone was wiser than Socrates (Ap., 20c-23c) and got the response, ‘No one is wiser’ (21a5-7). This report, however, was at odds with Socrates’ own conviction that he possessed no great knowledge of the virtues, and so he was provoked to conduct a long interpretive effort that would somehow preserve Apollo’s veracity. The result is the thesis that the god actually meant that Socrates is wisest by best grasping his own lack of genuine, divine wisdom concerning the virtues. This, in turn, is taken to mean that Apollo has – like a general – stationed Socrates in Athens, ordering him to philosophise and examine himself and others (28d10-29a2). And since one ought always to obey the command of a god at all costs, Socrates is obliged to philosophise regardless of any dangers (29d; cf. Republic, 368b-c). Despite their scepticism and outrage, then, Socrates’ jurors should ‘know well’ (Ap., 30a5) that the Oracle’s pronouncement marked a turning point in his life so profound that he now philosophises under a unique divine mandate (29c-30b, 33c).

Attractive though Socrates’ account is, many scholars who have found his uncompromising allegiance to rational philosophy attractive have been just as repelled by his grounding it on such shady religious origins. This puzzlement is legitimate, at least insofar as Apollo’s response to Chaerephon’s question is clearly and explicitly descriptive (describing the nature of Socrates’ wisdom), not prescriptive (telling Socrates what to do with his wisdom). In any case, it would appear that well before Chaerephon’s trip to Delphi Socrates had already been pursuing a life of refutational philosophy – that is what prompted Chaerephon’s long and difficult journey in the first place. Hence, the pronouncement of the Oracle could not have been what initiated his philosophical career. No wonder, then, that some have found Socrates’ ‘derivation’ of his alleged divine obligation to philosophise as analogous to pulling a rabbit from a hat: a rabbit concealed within the hat by the magician himself (Vlastos, 1991, p. 171).

Why does Socrates not end his interpretive quest after discovering the god’s meaning in saying that he is the wisest, but rather go on to try to convince his hapless interlocutors via the elenchos that they lack the expert knowledge they originally lay claim to? In particular, why do this when he knows that public refutation brings shame to his interlocutors, shame that breeds in turn the kind of hostility that will eventually land him in court on trial for his life (Ap., 22e-23a)? (Even now such responses plague the life of the ‘disrespectful’ Socratic teacher.) In any case why does Socrates give the slightest hoot about what these ignoramuses believe about themselves? We can imagine Socrates offering several plausible reasons.

First, we are told in the dialogue Crito that Socrates loves – has philia for – Athens in the way that a child loves his or her parents (e.g., Crito, 49e-52d). Socrates has even fought and risked his life for Athens. And since a politician – or any citizen for that matter – stands to harm Athens if he acts out of an unaware, hubristic assumption that he possesses sufficient wisdom to counsel the city, Socrates must for reasons of natural affection and filial piety attempt to convince that person of their lack of wisdom. Socrates chooses a politician as his initial candidate for testing by the elenctic method (Ap., 21 b-c).

Secondly, Socrates does indeed declare that the demands of piety require him to serve the gods by convincing the politician of his or her ignorance. But it is important to note that the story of the Oracle is the story of how Socrates in particular came to realise his unique status as Apollo’s missionary, a divine gift to Athens, set upon her as a gadfly, scourge and midwife who – unlike all other Athenians – is under an obligation to philosophise free of virtually all the mitigating or restraining factors present in the case of other people. His story simply is not our story since we lack his unique philosophical gifts, and it is certainly not the story of harmful bumblers like Euthyphro or ill-intentioned Sophists like Thrasymachus whose defeat by the Socratic method is reported in the Republic. Neither Apollo nor the demands of prudential self-interest require of any other Athenian – nor of any of us m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Credit list
• Introduction: education and political theory
• 1 Socrates, Plato, erôs, and liberal education
• 2 Aristotle’s educational politics and the Aristotelian renaissance in philosophy of education
• 3 Philosophy and education in Stoicism of the Roman imperial era
• 4 Medieval theories of education: Hugh of St Victor and John of Salisbury
• 5 Education, Erasmian humanism, and More’s Utopia
• 6 Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education
• 7 Locke on education and the rights of parents
• 8 Rousseau’s philosophy of transformative, ‘denaturing’ education
• 9 Educational theory and the social vision of the Scottish Enlightenment
• 10 Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on education
• 11 Self-cultivation (Bildung) and sociability between mankind and the nation: Fichte and Schleiermacher on higher education
• 12 Education and utopia: Robert Owen and Charles Fourier
• 13 Harriet Martineau and the Unitarian tradition in education
• 14 J. S. Mill on education
• 15 Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England
• 16 Idealism and education
• 17 ‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds, and the politics of Greek love
• 18 John Dewey: saviour of American education or worse than Hitler?
• Index