Class+1


 * Reading Response and Questions**

The //Republic// includes a proposed educational system to bring about the just society. The system is characterized by deep concern that we efficiently sort people into appropriate educational tracks for the work they will do for the society. Plato (through the mouthpiece Socrates) describes three basic tracks for students, and details what the education will consist of for each, appropriate to their role in the aimed-at republic. To waste time training what will be a craftsman as a ruler is wasteful and shortchanges both the future ruler and the future craftsman in that training that will more efficiently bring about excellence in their contributions to the good of the society. If we know that a student will be a carpenter, we don’t need to spend much time with that student on battle strategy. The proposed system is highly coordinated and well-developed to address broad social needs, and to bring about an improved social structure.
 * CLASS 1: The Republic and Educational Discourses**
 * Summary and Questions**

The //Republic// also includes the remarkable allegory of the cave, in many ways the default model for liberal learning, where we see the journey of learning as a culminating quest to question apparent phenomena to seek deeper, more legitimate justification. In the allegory, we see life-long inhabitants of a cave who mistake shadows of representations of objects for the real things turn to journey out of the cave to confront the actual objects (from which their cave-life perceptions were representative and derivative). The turning of the soul toward the sun and journeying out of the cave and from ignorant bondage is perhaps the most influential and lasting allegory for the individual’s need for, and process of education.

Finally, the //Republic// includes the character Socrates, that curious teacher whom educational scholarship (not to mention other fields and history) reveres and with whom it has wrestled since his arrival on the scene millennia ago. Socrates remains perhaps the most lasting model for teaching where the teacher’s role is not simply to lecture, or impart answers, or a particular curriculum, but to attend to others and pose questions and challenges to a student’s pronounced belief or knowledge and so to facilitate a student’s moral and intellectual development. Intimations of Socrates’ pedagogical method are showcased through interactions with his interlocuters Thrasymachus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus, and in numerous other Socratic dialogues, such as Euthyphro, Meno, and Crito. This dialectic as pedagogical method consists of dialogue that works toward a richer understanding of a given subject matter—even if (as is often the case) that understanding only amounts to admitting that the topic is more complicated than originally thought. While the //Republic// remains one of the few treatises where Socrates provides a substantive answer to the question at hand, in this case: “What is justice?”, the dialectic remains central to the overarching question, in this case: “Why choose to be just?” and sets the stage for the substantive response to the subordinate question: “What is justice?”. The essence of the dialectic is an exchange that leads both participants to a more enhanced understanding than either had originally. It is not, as the //Republic// sometimes seems, preliminary discussion leading to one participant ultimately revealing the pre-conceived full-blown answer. This sense of dialectic will play importantly as we consider the relationship between teachers and schools.

Though the models of the teacher, the school system, and the allegory are juxtaposed in the //Republic//, they aren’t integrated. Socrates is the ultimate maverick teacher. To situate Socrates as part of an institution of schooling is to mischaracterize him on a fundamental level. In fact, his indictment in the Apology, could easily be conceived as a charge that he was departing from, and thwarting the efforts of schooling, or conventional social ways of bringing up youth. In the unfolding of the educational system, the allegory of the cave is only applicable to a small portion of the population (i.e. the rulers) on its proposed route toward a just society, and is invoked, it should be remembered, allegorically—not literally—so the work of integrating the allegory within the system necessitates a preliminary interpretation and application of the allegory. Socrates interprets some elements of the allegory, but certainly not most of the pedagogically relevant aspects, such as teaching, and learning.

So it is not the case that within the proposed educational system, Plato argues for an integrated account that captures highly coordinated, efficient effort at providing an appropriate education for all members of society that seamlessly articulates the goods and process of liberal learning and models a kind of (Socratic) teaching that is the core of all educative activity. No. Instead of one account, we have three. The bulk of the “teaching” in the proposed system is more training than teaching. Different citizens are given an appropriate curriculum that suits them because of the type of work they will do in the eventual republic, and they are trained accordingly. The education is justified in terms of societal goods. What will make the good society is ultimately efficient sorting and training citizens for their contribution to the aimed-at society. The journey to leave the cave is an abrupt departure from training which [training]—if we were to transpose the system onto the allegory—is in preparation for the characteristic activities of the life-long cave-inhabitants. The journey to leave the cave is an inquiry into levels of justification for the presumed facts and accounts of life in the cave, and, as Socrates points out, one who has made such a journey may perform worse in the activities conducted within the cave. In other words, such a journey may be counterproductive to efficient work in the cave, or, returning to the republic, liberal educative effort may be counterproductive to efficient work in the republic (and efficient work in the republic is one of the primary aims of the school system). And it’s not clear how Socrates’ approach to teaching would fit in either (though he seems a more appropriate fit in the allegory). Those who have made the journey out of the cave may return and help others, but there is no model within the allegory for doing so, just the admonition that they ought to even while those who may make the attempt would likely be ridiculed by the cave-dwellers. We may justifiably (I think) take Socrates’ approach to be just such a model, but this is adopting a mode of engaging others in dialogue as the enactment of the work alluded to in the allegory, and if applied to the proposed educational system, it only applies to the guardians. In other words, we may be able to combine a conception of learning—given allegorically—with a conception of teaching, but we can’t combine these with a conception of school. Likewise, the school has its own conception of learning and teaching, more along the lines of training, which conflicts with these conceptions of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, Socrates remains a curious figure with regard to the confluence of a teaching and schooling discourse because he is the lone model for “teaching”—in the sense detailed by scholars articulating the particular goods of teaching—even as he articulates a highly developed proposal for a school, or system of education. Our trouble is that the model of teaching is to be found in this character explicitly outside of the system or allegory. What kind of role model is this? The role model is always breaking role—our ideal is a maverick.

The //Republic// presents a rich conception of school, with a corollary, integrated conception of teaching (training the three classes), but that conception of teaching does not match the teaching modeled by Socrates. Meanwhile, Socrates provides a model of teaching, but makes no attempt to appropriate it within a notion of school, or education system, unless it is supposed to be that teaching allegorized in the journey out of the cave, in which case, it only applies—again only allegorically—to a small portion of the system. So with the Republic, we have at least two accounts, both consistent, but neither able to fully digest the other.


 * Questions**:
 * 1) In what respects is contemporary educational practice reflective of a system of education vs. the allegory of the cave?
 * 2) How is Socrates an appropriate/inappropriate model for teaching today?
 * 3) According to the proposed system of education in the //Republic//, what is the most vital work of education? According to the Allegory of the cave, what is the most vital work of education? According to the model of Socrates as teacher, what is the role of instruction for the teacher? The student?