Plato and Education (RLE Edu K)

Robin Barrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136494741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This introduction to Plato's philosophical and educational thought examines Plato's views and relates them to issues and questions that occupy philosophers of education. Robin Barrow stresses the relevance of Plato today, while introducing the student both to Plato's philosophy and to contemporary educational debate.

In the first part of the book the author examines Plato's historical background and summarizes the Republic. Successive chapters are concerned with the critical discussion of specific educational issues. He deals with questions relating to the impartial distribution of education, taking as a starting point Plato's celebrated dictum that unequals should be treated unequally. He examines certain methodological concepts such as 'discovery-learning' and 'play' and also raises the wider question of children's freedom. He looks critically at the content of the curriculum and discusses Plato's theory of knowledge and attitude to art. Finally Robin Barrow discusses Plato's view of moral education and the related problem of what constitutes moral indoctrination

Chapter one

Introduction

WHY PLATO?

In a world that seems increasingly beset by the demand for instant gratification, by rapid change and by intense palaeophobia, the first question that has to be answered is ‘Why Plato?’ Why write yet another book about a man, dead for over two thousand years, who belongs to another age and another civilisation? What can Plato, citizen of a small Greek city-state in which the gods and goddesses of Olympus were still taken seriously, have to say that is of relevance to education in our technological age? With so many contemporary gurus to choose from, why do we still hark back to Plato?

The answer: because his perception and his reasoning power were outstanding, and he used them to wage an incessant campaign in pursuit of truth – truth about the movements of the heavenly bodies, truth about the nature of beauty, truth in the sphere of mathematics, truth in every sphere he could recognise, but above all, truth about how men ought to live and conduct their lives.

Having said that, let me add at once that nobody thinks that Plato found the truth in all these spheres. His metaphysical speculations about a life after death do not convince many today; his view that man can obtain moral knowledge as certain as scientific knowledge has been strongly contested, while some of his actual moral values – or what are presumed to have been his values have provoked an almost hysterical reaction from some critics in recent years. In addition, Plato is quite capable of being illogical, can be seen to be gaining points in argument on occasion by the simple device of equivocating over the meaning of a word, and in many celebrated passages forsakes rational argument altogether in favour of highly emotive mythical tales.

If we bear in mind also that at least some of his empirical claims now appear to have been clearly disproven, and that much of what he says is inevitably coloured by the beliefs and limited knowledge of the time in which he lived, it should be clear that Plato is not being introduced as some kind of final authority whose words should be received with hallowed respect and uncritical faith. His greatness lies in his astonishing ability to raise those questions which, while they would not normally occur to most of us, are none the less of enormous significance; his manner of clinging ruthlessly to such questions, refusing to take an easy way out or to ignore them as unpalatable obstacles in the way of his prejudices, and, despite the severe limitations acknowledged above, his relative capacity to argue his case rationally, penetratingly and powerfully.

Many of those who know Plato's work may well disagree with most of his conclusions; few would imagine that the conclusions could have been arrived at by a more capable advocate.

PHILOSOPHY PAST AND PRESENT

It is common to refer to a ‘revolution in philosophy’ which took place earlier this century, inaugurated by the work of Wittgenstein.

Philosophy today is broadly speaking understood by most practising philosophers to consist of the activity of analysis or the examination of meaning: a philosopher pursues such questions as ‘What constitutes indoctrination?’ or ‘What is it to be educated?’ ‘What could the claim that God exists or that all men are equal mean?’ ‘In what sense could such propositions be true?’ ‘What would count as evidence for or against their truth?’ With one or two notable exceptions philosophers do not regard it as part of their function to tell people how they ought to behave, how they ought to organise society or education, or wherein true wisdom lies.

Plato, by contrast, devotes a great deal of space to constructing Utopian societies, telling his readers how they ought to live, attempting to establish not only that there is an after life, but also that it takes a particular form, and generally taking seriously a class of metaphysical propositions that to one school of twentieth century thought at least (the logical-positivists) are literal non-sense.

But perhaps this distinction between analysis of meaning and prescription for conduct is more apparent than real, and perhaps ‘the elimination of metaphysics’ (the title of a chapter in Ayer, 1936) was not in fact the death blow to a certain kind of philosophy so much as one more contribution to the age old debate about such questions as whether God exists or whether there is some absolute and eternal principle of justice. After all, to claim as the logical-positivists did, that a statement of the form ‘this is just’ cannot be true or false, since it is really a way of expressing one's approval of the act, does not put an end to metaphysics: it is, in one sense, merely another move within the sphere of metaphysics. It is one answer to the metaphysical question ‘Does justice exist?’; by implication it is a negative answer, but, of course, it is not necessarily the correct answer – that after all is what the metaphysical argument is all about: are philosophers like Plato who claim some kind of real existence for Justice in the abstract convincing or, at the other extreme, are the logical-positivists convincing?

Similarly there is ultimately surely not a great deal of difference between arguing that ‘to be educated means such and such or necessarily involves such and such’ and arguing that people ought to be educated in such and such a way. For, if our concern is with the normative use of the term education, then our analysis of the concept will necessarily involve reference to our values. Again the object of enquiring into the meaning and use of moral terminology is presumably intended to throw some light on what conduct may reasonably be regarded as worthy of moral approval, which suggests that such analysis is merely one means of attempting to answer the age old question ‘How ought we to live our lives?’ And this technique of analysis is very far from being the discovery of this century. Plato was the originator of it, so far as we can tell; for those innumerable dialogues that start from a question such as ‘What is courage?’ are nothing if not object lessons in conceptual analysis (e.g. Plato, ‘Laches’).

In short, although there are passages in Plato that go beyond what we would expect from an academic philosopher today – not least because Plato was pioneering in the fields of sociology and psychology as well – essentially he remains an excellent example of the philosopher, even as currently understood. By means of close analysis of key concepts and rigorous argument he attempts to approach some kind of answer to these elusive questions that cannot readily be answered by appeal to the senses, consensus or experiment.

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

Philosophers dispute the nature of philosophy of education no less than they dispute the proper bounds of philosophy in general. Here I only have space to assert my own view that philosophy of education is nothing more nor less than the application of philosophy to specifically educational issues. On this view it is not a logically distinct branch of philosophy, and it involves recourse to such logically distinct branches as there are. As Hare has observed, there can be no doubt that ‘Plato was the founder of the philosophy of education’ (Hare, 1970, vol.1, p.15) in this sense. For that is to say that the application of philosophy to the sphere of education, the relating of the findings of ethics, political philosophy, epistemology and so on to education, was one of his basic concerns – which is undeniably true.

However the combined impact of the educational view of Plato, countless other philosophers and countless other people, has naturally given rise over the years to new objections and new questions. Thus contemporary philosophers of education are interested in a number of concepts and arguments with which Plato, for one, does not directly deal. For example, Plato's own political and educational proposals readily give rise to the accusation that what he advocates amounts to ‘indoctrination’. Here we have a concept that has occupied a great deal of the time of contemporary philosophers, but with which Plato does not concern himself directly at all. (He does, of course, by implication, effectively state that in his view it is not indoctrination, or, alternatively, that, if it is, the term has no pejorative implication and he is in favour of it.) Other concepts and issues that both interest contemporary philosophers of education and spring readily to mind when one reads Plato (either as points he seems to have missed or as points he seems to be making in another way) are: autonomy, discovery learning, play, knowledge, the concept of education itself, the question of the degree of freedom that should be granted to children in various respects, the notion of a liberal education, the question of a just distribution of education, and above all, the whole issue of moral education.

My object in the following pages has been to convey what Plato has to say about education, to relate it to his philosophical underpinning, to examine the cogency of that philosophical underpinning to some extent, and to relate the whole to some of the issues, such as those mentioned above, that concern the contemporary philosopher of education. My hope is that the pertinence of Plato today will thus be self-evident, and that the reader will treat this book, not as a compendium of the thoughts of a Great Man, but as material for critical thought.

It is quite likely that much of what Plato has to say will strike some readers as thoroughly obnoxious – there are many aspects of his point of view which happen to rest ill alongside the current liberal orthodoxy. He is in many respects a challenge to that orthodoxy. But he who shares with Plato a passion for the truth, rather than a mean-spirited devotion to his present opinions, will know that the challenge must be seriously examined and met by rational argument, or else rightly judged to be compelling.

OUTLINE OF THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS

The points made above explain to some extent the format of this book. Chapter 2 briefly sets Plato in his historical context, since there are a number of things that Plato says and proposes which cannot be properly understood except in the context of his times. The view that somebody historical background may have important repercussions on some of their attitudes and beliefs is, of course, quite distinct from the view that the validity of a person's attitudes or beliefs is historically (or culturally) determined, and from the view that all knowledge is necessarily conditioned and controlled by the pervading ethos of a particular time and place. The claim here is that Plato has things to say which transcend the circumstances in which he found himself, but that he was clearly influenced by some of those circumstances in some ways.

In chapter 3 the argument of the ‘Republic’ is outlined – first the general political proposals and then the educational programme. Exposition of the former is necessary in that Plato's educational views are very closely interwoven with his ethico-political views. His educational views are not by any means expressed only in the ‘Republic’, and this is not a book on the ‘Republic’ exclusively. None the less that dialogue contains his fullest statement of the principles by which he thinks we should be governed in educational matters.

Chapter 4 considers Plato's distribution of education and the question of whether the policy of one kind of education for one kind of person and another for another offends the principle of equality or justice. Chapter 5 is concerned with certain points that Plato makes about teaching methods. In particular it is concerned to suggest that attempts to cite Plato as the source of certain currently popular notions is without foundation.

The remaining three chapters are all concerned with the curriculum or the content of education. In chapter 6 Plato's theory of knowledge is examined, in chapter 7 his attitudes to the arts, and in chapter 8 the findings of the two previous chapters are brought together in relation to the topic on which Plato has most to say: moral education.

Chapter two

Historical background

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

In 431 BC democratic Athens and her allies went to war with the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta, which may reasonably be seen as the prototype of a closed or totalitarian society. The war lasted on and off for twenty-eight years. In 404 BC the Athenians were defeated and the democracy was replaced by a government of thirty pro-Spartan oligarchs – known simply as the Thirty. But even prior to the final defeat, morale must have been severely shaken in Athens. During the first few years of the war the city was ravaged by plague and, with the death of Pericles, she lost a notable statesman, whose successors, according to one contemporary source, ‘were all concerned to advance themselves; they adopted cheap political tactics and so failed to control affairs properly; naturally many mistakes were made’ (Thucydides, ‘The Peloponnesian War’, 2.65. Cf.Aristotle, ‘Constitution of Athens’, 28.1).

A series of important events illustrate a prima facie loss of sound judgment on the part of the democracy, and increasing tension within the city. On one day in 427 BC the Assembly voted to put to death every adult male in the city of Mytilene, which had unsuccessfully tried to revolt; on the next day the vote was reversed (Thucydides, 3.36 ff.). In 424 BC Cleon who ‘more than anybody debased politics by his violent methods, ranting, raving, abusing and insulting in the Assembly’ (Aristotle, ‘Constitution of Athens’, 28.1) was elected from nowhere to a generalship. He was elected, if Thucydides is to be believed, on the extraordinary grounds that the mass of the people thought it would be good sport to foist a command on him that he did not really want, while ‘the more intelligent took the view that if Cleon were to succeed that would be good for the city, and that if he failed that would put paid to him’ (Thucydides, 4.27 ff.). In 416 BC the Athenians voted to put to death all the male inhabitants of the island of Melos simply because it wanted to remain neutral. Theoretically, one would have expected it to be an ally of the Spartans (since the Melians and the Spartans had racial ties). This time there were no second thoughts and Thucydides records a memorable dialogue between the Melian and Athenian representatives, in which the arguments of the latter represent a locus classicus for amoral cynicism (Thucydides, 5.85 ff.). Perhaps the most foolhardy of decisions was made in 415 BC when the Athenians, by no means in a position of strength in the Aegean, voted to open up a new theatre of war in Sicily. The result was a catastrophic defeat involving the loss of thousands of men. So grave was the crisis precipitated by that defeat that in 411 BC the democracy was temporarily suspended; for a short period Athens was actually in a state of effective civil war, with the oligarchs dominating the city itself, and the democrats operating from the naval base on the island of Samos.

In drawing attention to these events I have, of course, been highly selective, and in cataloguing them so briefly I have in no way done justice to their complexity. To make but one cautionary reservation: although it is certainly true that contemporary sources are by and large unanimous in condemning Pericles’ successors as demagogues, it is also true that most contemporary sources are the work of those who might be classified as of oligarchic persuasion.(For a full account of this matter, see Barrow, 1973, ch.4.) However, no historian could deny, I think, that the war years produced tension and disillusion in Athens. To many Athenians it must have seemed that the democratic system had proved itself incompetent to govern wisely, and that the strain of war had had a lamentable effect on the unifying power of those beliefs and values that had been the pride of Athens in happier days.

SOCRATES

Socrates lived through, and Plato grew up during, the second half of the war. Trying to disengage the philosophical views of these two men is a difficult task, since most of what we know about Socrates comes from Plato's dialogues (in most of which the former figures as the main participant). But it seems reasonable to suggest that the historical Socrates probably held the following beliefs: that the unexamined life, or a life devoid of the questioning spirit, is not worth living; that there are certain abiding principles of conduct which should be adhered to; and that one of these principles is that one should abide by the laws of the country to which one belongs, even though one may devote one's life to arguing for their abolition.

The son of a stonemason and a midwife, Socrates, although himself trained as a stonemason, devoted most of his life to philosophy or the quest for knowledge and truth. According to some sources he was originally interested in questions that we would characterise as belonging to the natural sciences (Aristophanes, ‘Clouds’). But his preoccupation soon became metaphysical subjects and, in particular, the sphere of ethics. His central concern became to examine the question of in what the Good Life consisted.

One necessary condition of living the Good Life, he became convinced, was to know oneself. ‘Know thyself was, in fact, a maxim long associated with traditional Greek wisdom, and Socrates seems to have taken this maxim over and interpreted it to mean that it is a man's positive duty to have a real understanding of himself and, in particular, to know the limits of his own wisdom. The most vivid account of this notion of self-knowledge is presented in Plato's ‘Apology’...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title page
• Copyright
• Perface
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Historical background
• 3  The ‘Republic’
• 4  The distribution of education
• 5  Methodology
• 6  Curriculum 1 Knowledge
• 7  Curriculum 2 Art
• 8  Moral upbringing
• Suggestions for further reading
• Bibliography