Plato's Attempt to Control Early Education

In Book II of Plato's Republic, Socrates begins to discuss the education of young children. He doesn't want children exposed to bad stories, but wants them to be exposed only to good stories. Students are frequently outraged at this "censorship."

The line that Socrates wants to draw seems to be that he doesn't want young children exposed to stories that teach falsehoods. Instead he wants them exposed to what is true.

The particular way this plays out is that he wants to reject false stories about the gods: stories that portray them as petty and immoral, hating each other and treating each other badly. Instead, he wants the stories about the gods to be stories that portray the gods as good.

A student in class today objected that this was one-sided: to only want to teach goodness. At some point, young people need to be exposed to the reality of problems and badness in the world.

But goodness and truth are so tightly-aligned in ancient Greek thought that my mind made a sideways shift and I wondered if this student's objection might sound to Socrates like someone saying, "But teaching only about truth is so one-sided! If education is to be balanced and fair, we should give equal time to teaching falsity as well!"

That, of course, was not what my student intended to say at all. But our contemporary political world seems at times to champion such a view!

More specifically, Socrates thought that it was bad for young children to hear stories about badness prevailing. I agree with my student's concern that people at some stage need to face the reality that bad things can happen. But how we tell those stories does matter, I think. Do we tell these stories in ways that disillusion and intimidate? Or do we tell these stories in ways intended to inspire and empower people to triumph over life's adversity?

Kierkegaard Quotation

From Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling:

"Suppose someone wanting to learn to dance said: 'For hundreds of years now one generation after another has been learning dance steps, it's high time I took advantage of this and began straight off with a set of quadrilles.' One would surely laugh a little at him; but in the world of spirit such an attitude is considered utterly plausible. What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age."

--Kierkegaard, Soren, Fear and Trembling, translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books, 1985, p. 75.

May College 2008

May College 2008 has ended. This year, we had a May College 2008 Blog, and I posted to it a few times. Because these postings are relevant to my blog here, let me post links to my postings:

Ethics as Critical Literacy (May 21, 2008)

Your Anti-Transcript (May 22, 2008)

Skills vs. Knowledge (May 23, 2008)

I may repost these here as well.

First Draft of Liberal Education Goals

May Faculty College has begun, and this year's theme is "General Education 2.0: Exploring Essential Literacies." Our first assignment was to think about what we each regard as essential literacies. What do we hope that our students learn in their four years in college, and/or what skills do we think it is important that they develop? Here are my own preliminary thoughts.

Reasoning/Critical Thinking:

• deductive and inductive reasoning
  
• what counts as evidence in different fields
• constructing arguments (ability to do so; also, understanding of processes for doing so in different disciplines -- e.g., the scientific method)
• critiquing arguments (difference between finding problems in structure of reasoning vs. assessing quality and relevance of evidence)
• also - ability to recognize, critique, and avoid fallacies
• (note that quantitative reasoning fits into all of the above)
  

Good Communication Skills (perception and expression):

• reading, writing, listening, speaking
• other forms of creative expression and performance (e.g., visual, musical, kinesthetic)
  
• ability to do the above in various settings: face-to-face/in person, or via technology/media
• aesthetic awareness/aesthetic skill (in all aspects of perception and expression)
  

Understanding the World:

• historically
• different cultures, different religious traditions, different political systems
• natural world (includes environmental awareness)
  

Understanding Oneself:

• biologically, psychologically, sociologically
• one's own interests and abilities
• one's own values and ethical orientation

Quotation from Aristotle on Education

From Aristotle: "And those who have just learned something do not yet know it, though they string the words together; for it must grow into them, and this takes time."

--Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book VII, Chapter 3 (1147a20).
Translated by Terence Irwin, Hackett Publishing Company, 2nd edition, 1999, p. 103.

On Simplicity and Complexity and Education

One of the motivations for anti-intellectualism is the appeal to "keep it simple." Simplification makes things easier to understand, but at a cost. Something is lost in translation.

While teaching is about helping people to understand, and simplification is a necessary step along the way, real understanding requires coming to terms with increasing levels of complexity. Education is a process of initiation into more complex truths.

The process of clarification requires stripping complex concepts down, but then building them back up again, layer by layer. Teachers can show their students how to do this, but students need to learn to repeat this on their own over and over again until they themselves become able to see the simple in the complex, and the complex in the simple.

The Seven Liberal Arts, Part I

The classic seven liberal arts were the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic [or logic]), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). These were preparatory studies for the more advanced fields of philosophy and theology.

Are our students well-grounded in these fields? Should they be?

Many of my students claim not to have studied grammar at all. Some students do study grammar at the college level: by studying a foreign language. In classical times, much of grammar was also taught through studying other languages: Greek and Latin. Why is grammar so devalued now? Is there value to understanding that language has structure, and that different languages can be structured very differently?

It seems to me that grammar has been devalued because one can develop a good grasp of grammar without actually acquiring a workable fluency in speaking another language, or without acquiring good writing skills in one's own language. And people raised speaking several languages can speak those languages fluently and can write quite eloquently without consciously knowing grammar. But to use these observations as a critique of the study of grammar is to make a mistake about the purpose of studying grammar. The value of understanding the structure of language has little to do with whether it makes you a fluent speaker or a poetic writer. The latter skills are valuable in their own right, but are not the reasons for studying grammar.

The reason for studying grammar is to learn the different ways that language is structured. It is only when one closely studies the structures of different languages that one begins to understand the difference between language and thought (so closely related that most modestly-educated people think that there is no difference at all).