The End...

I hate to start this blog off on a depressing note, but when I think about relating what we’ve discussed in class to my work (as a grad student, and as someone who evaluates student teachers), I can’t help but feel like the philosophers (and we as educators) have imagined these great educational ideals that all but fall apart in practice.

            But maybe I shouldn’t always compare the reality to the ideal.  Public schools will never be perfect; that’s certain for as long as the societies surrounding them remain imperfect.  But inasmuch as working towards those goals can lead to some improvement, it helps to keep the “ideal” in mind, right? 

            I evaluate six teachers in five different schools across the city.  Four of those teachers work in alternative charter schools.  The students in those schools have either 1) been released from jail or juvenile detention centers and are trying to gain credits toward graduation, 2) been expelled from CPS, 3) left school because they have become pregnant or severely ill or 4) some combination of the above.  Of the other two teachers, one teaches in a CPS high school with a 7^th and 8^th grade academic center, and one is teaching in a private Catholic high school. 

            My favorite classes to sit in on are the ones in the alternative schools, and it’s been that way since the beginning of the semester.  I’ve found the administration and staff to be the most knowledgeable and accommodating, the teachers, though vastly underpaid, seem to be the most creative and diligent, and the students are exactly like high school students everywhere: confused, bright, noisy, curious, excitable, bored, in need of attention, violent at times and really, really funny. I think what makes those classrooms so comfortable for me is how honest they are. Things are out in the open.  The students and teachers and staff are, for the most part, aware of each others’ backgrounds.  They know who just got out of jail last week, who is most likely to have the least support at home because they are raising themselves, and who can only read at a grammar school level because they didn’t attend school for years at a time.  And these things are addressed fairly openly, along with assignments and academic progress.  The classes are small, progress is measured as independently as possible, and I have seen very few lessons that the students weren’t engaged in.  And high school students can be a tough crowd!

            I don’t want to romanticize it, but I see way more of what we’ve been discussing in the past few weeks in these classrooms than I do in the standard public high school.  And for the most part, it’s not the teachers’ “fault”; they do what they can, and they’re being regulated down to the minute.  In a 46-minute period, they only teach for about 20.  They have 30+ kids in their classes, more than half have IEPs (though it’s extremely unclear exactly how many of those students truly have disabilities; many seem to be inappropriately diagnosed), and just last week, one of my teachers had to “re”-teach her seniors nouns, pronouns and adjectives.  Almost none of her students could pass a quiz on them.  It’s hard to think about an interdisciplinary curriculum that would have life experience at its center when 18-year-olds can’t explain what a noun is…although a curriculum like that in that classroom would probably make the most difference…

…And as I’ve had conversations with the teachers in the different schools, and as I’ve experienced this class, I’m more and more convinced that we have many of the things we need to give students a great education, we’ve just decided that we don’t really think they deserve it.  But the funny thing is, I’ve been allowed to see these spaces where the most forgotten of the forgotten kids go to learn, and because it’s kind of “off the radar”, they have in their classrooms things that we would want for all of our kids: really dedicated, knowledgeable teachers, a safe environment, a challenging, relevant curriculum, class sizes no larger than 15 students, support staff, college transition counselors, the “works”.  I think, as a society, we’ve just convinced ourselves that these kids aren’t going to “make it” anyway, so if a few of them get to have these resources for a year or so while they’re in alternative school, that’s fine.  But giving them all of this from day one? Nonsense.  If they want a really education, they should just get expelled so they can go to alternative school.  That, or miraculously become really, really rich.

So not only did I start on a depressing note, I guess I’m ending on one too.  I think what I’m trying to say is that while each philosopher illuminated some themes that we need to grapple with (and no doubt we will for a long time), what these readings have done is given us a foundation upon which to build and organize our ideas and perspectives.  But in terms of concrete ideas on what could make public education “better”? I think these readings, especially the Whitehead and Dewey selections, remind us that we do have insight into what should be happening in classrooms, what we still need to cultivate is the will to make it happen.

Reflections

At this point in the philosophy of education journey, I definitely have more questions than I have answers.  While I feel like I understand the backgrounds of some thinkers better, and class discussion has definitely helped me contextualize the readings, I’m not sure how to connect the knowledge I’ve gained with my analysis of education policy.  But this doesn’t mean that the class wasn’t a good one, in fact, I think the opposite.  I’m just thinking more deeply about how to apply this information to the policies that govern what happens in schools and school system, and as I do that I seem to stumble upon more questions…

            What I’ve come to understand is that some of the readings act as a magnifying glass as much as they do a prescription of how to “run” schools. By that I mean that trying to understand our experiences in schools through the lenses of these readings definitely made me more aware of the strengths and weakness in classrooms that I’ve been in, and classrooms in general.  More than give ideas about the way school should work, the pieces we read made it easier to understand the larger questions that need to constantly be asked of/about public schools: Who is this place for? What is this place for? Who is being included in and excluded from learning experiences? What specific subjects are we teaching and why? How are teaching these subjects? How are we measuring success?

            Of course, those questions are answered differently at each school, and sometimes they’re answered differently inside each classroom.  But I think shying away from those questions because they beget a wide range of answers is what gets us in the worst predicaments in schools. We’re always looking for the one problem that needs to be fixed, and we assume that it is as easy to fix as it is to identify, so each decade we “fix” something different thinking it will be the last time.  If there’s anything that the Cahn compilation has taught us, however, is that change is constantly occurring, There are very few, if any, simple, swift solutions. And even if there were more, each solution has to be sustainable and relevant.  When it ceases to be either of those, it’s not really a solution anymore.  So as we move forward, I think we should link this knowledge to policy in ways that make it clear that we’re thinking about the current generations and future ones, the current society and future society, and what we want those to look like.

Dewey's Democracy and Education (1)

            In the “School as Special Environment” section, Dewey begins to move beyond training and socialization to discuss what “office” the school holds that makes it important in and of itself. He writes,

“…our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures.  Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters.”

            This quote is so important because it makes clear that idea school not only has a specific function beyond training young people to exhibit behaviors that will make them socially acceptable, or even preparing for the roles they will have in their own communities and nations, it exists because without it, we cannot help people make sense of the world outside their immediate communities.  There are people and systems whose actions affect ours, and vice versa, and schools are the formal institution whose job it is to teach people how that happens.  I think we forget that all too often, and/or we move the “making sense of the world” part of education to colleges and universities, leaving large groups of people out of the process.  He continues,     

“…it is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from the influence upon mental habitudes.  It establishes a purified medium of action…As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society.  The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end”

            Dewey opened Democracy and Education with a discussion of human reproduction, and here he begins to discuss social reproduction, and the role the school has in shaping it.  Whereas previous thinkers we’ve looked at have talked about reason and its relation to morality, and the idea of humans becoming more moral with each generation if education is executed properly, I feel like Dewey articulates these ideas in a way that incorporates agency in a way other thinkers hadn’t.  For him, education and communication don’t exist in a vacuum.  So even as we become better thinkers or “reasoners”, the school has to make choices about what past human achievements are worth teaching in order to help create a better society. Just knowing things, or being able to reason, doesn’t make humans better over time. Dewey then goes on to say,

            “In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with the broader environment.  Such words as “society” and “community” are likely to be misleading, for they have the tendency to make us think that there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.”

            Humans, according to this passage, are equally limited in their ability to know about the world outside of their immediate society, no matter what social group their born into.  I know this passage can be used to argue for the importance of education because of its ability to help people gain better class positions.  But for me it’s a great reminder that any position in society is limited if it remains connected from the greater world. Furthermore, it reminds me to resist the idea that there is only one way to understand community and society, rather there are communities and societies, all acting upon and reacting to each other, making education much more complex, but also that much more necessary if you agree with Dewey’s idea of the purpose of schools.

Whitehead's Aims of Education

Whitehead, in The Aims of Education, posits that the main problem with education is that students receive far too many inert ideas during the course of their schooling.  Inert ideas are pieces of information that are given to students without any context, and they remain disconnected from other ideas because they are not used or tested.  Because this is the dominant pedagogy, students become “a disheartened crowd of young folk, inoculated against any outbreak of intellectual zeal.”

Whitehead is writing mostly about education that takes place after age 16, what we would think of a secondary and higher education.  He believes that training, which takes place until age 12, is mainly done in the home, by mothers.  In order for education to actually mean something, that is, for students to learn more than inert ideas, there is a process of learning that must take place for each idea or subject matter.  In addition to that process, people must realize that teaching itself is a craft that can’t be done by anyone, and can’t be measured in the objective manner that many propose.  A teacher has to be skilled to guide students through the educational process, and the way student learning is evaluated can’t be governed by sweeping generalizations about what students should be exposed to.  I think the paragraph on page 264 that begins with “The best procedure…” resonates today, as the dominant thinking about education today is that students’ progress can be measured objectively, as if their minds are “dead matter.”

The process, or rhythm of education, should, in Whitehead’s view, begin with the romance stage.  In this stage, the student’s interest is sparked in a subject or idea. The teacher must be careful at this stage not to enforce too much discipline around learning facts about the subject because that can “kill” the curiosity that the student has.  At the same time, however, the teacher has to be a skillful guide so that the student comes to the realization that there is so much more to learn about their interest.  The next stage is the precision stage, in which the student receives concrete knowledge about the subject, and the skills necessary to apply their knowledge in the final stage. The generalization stage is the one in which a student can apply the skill they learned in the precision stage to the larger world.  These stages together make knowledge useful and applicable in the world, which is something that Whitehead sees little of.  When experienced fully, the stages also allow the student to retain the sense of wonder they have about the world and their intellectual growth isn’t stunted.

Whitehead notes that it is possible for the student to move through all stages in one subject but not in others, meaning that meaningful knowledge can be developed in one subject, but be stunted in another.  I could see that happening a lot with students at the high school and college level, because they have so many different teachers and professors, and depending on how the teacher approaches the subject, and how they handle discipline, that romance stage could either be encouraged or stifled.  From what I understand, a student has to be intrigued by a subject, and that initial intrigue is what can set the process in motion.  But I’m wondering must the student discover the subject themselves, or can it be something that is introduced by the teacher as long as that teacher lets the curiosity develop and lead to questions which move into the precision stage?

Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman

            In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft asserts that the primary problem with education is that it is denied to women.  This has been done, according to her, because men have decided to consider women only as objects of attraction, not as human beings capable of reason.  If they were considered to be the latter, they would need the education afforded to men.  If they received that education, they would be fit for both of their roles: citizens and wives/mothers.  Because they haven’t received it, they have only been able to become what society has shaped them into: silly people only concerned with fashion and lapdogs.

            Vindication,  though it is most obviously a response to Rousseau, is a reconsideration of Kant’s and Plato’s ideas in that it pushes readers to think about the purpose of reason, the place of morality, and the end goal(s) of education.  While I think the piece definitely had its limitations (which Jane Roland Martin highlighted in the afterword), I found myself agreeing with a lot of what Wollstonecraft proposed, and I could definitely see how these issues are pertinent to education and feminist concerns today.

            I appreciate the importance that Wollstonecraft placed on socialization.  While I don’t agree that a woman who’s concerned with appearances can’t also be brilliant, I think that we’re still, as a society, trying figure out how we understand the connection between what we think of as femininity, and intellect. American women are still primarily encouraged to be beautiful objects before they are encouraged to be smart and independent, if for no other reason than it gives them more impetus to buy things that will make them appear beautiful.  And even though traditional marriage is being challenged every moment, I still think there’s overwhelming pressure on women to be wives and mothers as a testament to their “true” womanhood. Even the most successful, famous women (heterosexual or not) aren’t considered “complete” until they have a partner and kids. Wollstonecraft talked about women’s illegitimate, or “false”, power: their ability to use feminine wiles to attract men. She contended that for as long as women thought of that power as their main source of power, they’d be victims of patriarchy. To not give up the power of feminine beauty and embrace the power that comes with being considered a rational human being, to Wollstonecraft, was a true sign of lacking intellectual capacity. To some extent, I agree with her, especially when we think about women in this country who, not more than sixty years ago, were urged to go to college to find a husband, not to pursue a degree that would be used for work outside of the home, and thus led lives that they considered unfulfilling.  But I also think that a complete rejection of feminine attributes isn’t necessary for women to be taken seriously.  Although I’m alive now, and in Wollstonecraft’s time, there wasn’t the “middle ground” that we have today (which Roland also takes up).

I can’t help thinking about this in light of celebrity culture, though.  We still celebrate silly women who don’t (appear to) think about anything important.  We pay them lots of money to do this, and we even let kids emulate them. And they have lapdogs…

Kant's Lectures on Pedagogy

          Reading Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy forced me to revisit lots of the themes we’ve been discussing so far: the purpose of education, the stages of mental and moral development, the relationship between teachers and parents, the relationship between students and society and so on.  Because Kant believed that the purpose of education was to give humans a way to morally perfect themselves, it made perfect sense that the parts of the lectures that were compiled had the most to do with morality, and how to educate children to become morally sounds members of society. According to Kant, that meant recognizing that children are children, and that there is such a thing as developmentally appropriate pedagogy, which we also learned from Rousseau.  But from Kant we also get the sense, as we did from Locke, that there are some things that tutors or parents must do early on to ensure that their children don’t become spoiled or shameful.  If they do, they won’t become adults who care about the well being of humanity, which defeats the purpose of education to Kant.  One passage forced me to question how we’re dealing with this issue today,

“Children must be taught only those things that are suitable to their age.  Some parents are pleased when their children can talk in a precocious manner at an early age…It is just as insufferable when a child already wants to keep up with the latest fashions…But children become vain when one chatters to them quite early about how beautiful they are…Finery is not suitable to children…But the parents must also attach no value to these things, not look at themselves in the mirror, for here as everywhere example is all-powerful and reinforces or destroys good teaching” (Kant).

We see this a lot with youth today. They are thrust into what we may consider adult activity and consumption patterns for a multitude of reasons: parents and family members give kids material things to compensate for whatever is lacking at home, youth are able to live a large part of their lives outside of their parents’ supervision because of the time spent in “virtual reality” or just outside of the home, parents want to be their children’s “friends” because they think it will keep kids emotionally close to them so they allow behavior that they would otherwise deem inappropriate, parents think that kids’ who take on  adult qualities are more mature or “smarter” so they encourage it, kids feel that they have to take on adult traits at a young age because they are caregivers and/or responsible family members really early on, etc. I’m wondering, what’s the school’s role in all of this?  Are teachers and administrators responsible for addressing these kinds of behavior as they see it in their students? Or is it solely the responsibility of the family?  

Rousseau's Emile

“There would be no difficulty if our three educations were merely different.  But what is to be done when they are at cross purposes?  Consistency is plainly impossible when we seek to educate a man for others, instead of for himself.  If we have to combat either nature or society, we must choose between making a man or making a citizen.  We cannot make both.  There is an inevitable conflict of aims, from which come two opposing forms of education: the one communal and public, the other individual and domestic.” –Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau writes the above quote in the first few pages of Emile, right after he begins to establish where education “comes from” (nature, men or things) and what it’s purpose should be (to make a man).  He argues, contrary to Locke, that childhood is not simply a pre-cursor to manhood; therefore children should not be treated as “little adults”, but should be allowed to live naturally as children. They should be introduced to reason and morality as they have the capacity to understand it and use them.  As children, they will only understand the huge concepts in “bits and pieces”, and even then, we can’t be sure that children are understanding concepts as we would like them to, because they may not have arrived at stage of development that would allow them to take in such complex ideas. I agree that as educators we should be careful not to infringe upon childhood too early with ideas that students have plenty of time to learn.  I also appreciate Rousseau’s understanding of the difficulty it takes to at once produce a person who can live for themselves and function in a society full of people with different needs.  That task will always be a difficult one.  Unfortunately, I think some people have given up on educating children for anything besides a very narrow idea of success…

I saw the movie Waiting for Superman this weekend.  It was supposed to be about schools, I think. But what it was really about (at least one of the things it was about) was the misunderstanding American folks have about the purposes of education. It was based on the premise that American schools are failing, and failing is defined as having a high drop-out rate, having low standardized test scores, and producing students that are inadequately prepared for high-skilled tech jobs that Americans must hold in order for our country to remain economically competitive.  Our education system will be deemed successful, according to the movie, when all American students are proficient in math and science, they go to college, and get the best jobs. For schools to produce these kinds of students, they need to have to have great teachers. Great teachers are those who are the most charismatic, innovative and produce high standardized test scores in their classes. These great teachers are out there, but can’t succeed at their jobs because they are outnumbered by bad teachers who are allowed to continue teaching under the protection of the teachers’ unions. So where can students go to learn from great teachers only? Where can they get the education needed to make them successful in the future economy? Where can great teachers continue to be great without having to worry about bad teachers screwing up their work? Charter schools. 

Obviously, I’m leaving some parts of the movie out.  But I think the premise that success is only material wealth, and that it can only be produced in very few educational spaces, is faulty, especially when it’s so closely linked to the economic power of the nation.  At the same time educating kids to be critical thinkers and members of communities is looked down upon, we’re expected to work really hard for the big American “community” without question. 

I’m not completely sure how Rousseau’s idea of the citizen and the man would fit here. I suppose our society would be exactly the thing Rousseau would want to get kids away from, because we’re obviously teaching them very early on about competition, standardization and segregation, long before they know what they’re getting into.  I suppose he would continue to argue that Plato’s republic has long since been dead, so educating someone to be a “citizen” in our day and age is worthless.  They could only turn out to be greedy and individualistic, devoid of all of the characteristics he would value.

Locke's Thoughts on Education

“Therefore, if we seek the roots of what is valuable in modern education philosophy, we must turn to Locke’s Thoughts on Education, even if many of its specific recommendations are now wholly out of date or irrelevant.” – Peter Gay

Must we?

I think I understand Gay’s point, that Locke’s thinking about education was revolutionary in its day, and that it provided a foundation for the way we understand the child and modern education.  I would also agree, somewhat, that because reading Locke gives us historical perspective, it is important to revisit. But I’m not sure that I agree that if we’re looking for the roots of what’s valuable in modern education philosophy, we must turn to Locke, especially if we see its irrelevancies, and those irrelevancies have implications for how we understand education in terms of class, race, culture and gender. What I mean is, if we know that Locke was really only concerned, in this piece, with the education of boys in the highest social class, and we agree that some of his specific suggestions are irrelevant, and we’re undecided in education circles about the issues he raises: curriculum, discipline, purpose schooling’s purpose, how necessary is it to revisit him with the vigor that Gay suggests? And I guess my question would stand for many thinkers we study.  (And I’m really not asking this to be flip, I’m actually trying to understand how to use this information in a meaningful way.)

I spent the weekend in San Francisco at a conference for social justice educators. (I’m not convinced that anyone really knows what they’re talking about anymore when they use the term “social justice”, myself included, but I digress.)  There were classroom teachers, youth organizers, education non-profit workers, professors, academics-in-training and administrators in attendance.  Two keynote addresses were given, one by an administrator of a social justice school in California, the other by XXX. who many hoped would be the US Secretary of Education when Barack Obama was elected president. The work that attendees were doing varied from teaching in public schools, to advising school districts on how their schools might create meaningful relationships with community organizations, to working in political campaigns, and even within these discussions among educators who’ve been in this field for decades, the thinkers that people were citing were ones that had specific class or race or gender analyses. That’s what seemed to matter most for this crowd, even in the midst of the dominant post-racial, pro-economic competitiveness discourse that happening around education now. So, for this movement, the “social-justice” (for lack of a better term) educational movement, what’s the importance of Locke?

On The Teacher

            St. Augustine considers truth and where it comes from in On The Teacher.  He has a conversation with his son, Adeodatus, and during this conversation, the two men try to make sense of what language is for, how it helps teachers pass information to their students, and how understanding actually comes about.  Augustine comes to the conclusion that comprehension does not happen simply because a teacher “gives” knowledge to a student by explaining something to them, it happens when the information is “shown” to the student in a way that is conducive to their comprehension.  This kind of teaching, however, is best performed by Christ, “the teacher within”.   Philip Quinn writes,

“Christ teaches by showing or presenting directly to the learners’ mind, not signs for things, but the intelligible things signified by such signs….In short, like human teaching, divine teaching is showing rather than telling.  The difference is that the divine teacher can show the learners mind intelligible things and human teachers cannot.”

I understand Augustine’s ideas about the “teacher within” in much the same way I understand the theory of the “forms”: as humans we can only understand so much about the world and our lives, that there is some ultimate truth that we will never know.  According to that theory, as humans we will not reach perfection, we can only strive for it, and what we see and experience in our lives are earthly versions of the true forms.  But where do these ideas, and Augustine’s, leave teachers?

I think Augustine’s philosophy is helpful in that it takes some of the “pressure” off of teachers by making it clear that they are not the only people responsible for students’ understanding. No matter how well a teacher teaches, in theory, there is some revelation to the mind that happens only when a third party makes comprehension possible.  But, if we take that theory too far in the other direction, it could lead us to a place where we think that teachers aren’t valuable at all.  This kind of thinking is evident in scripted curricula and teaching practices that are designed so that “anyone can teach”.  They devalue the position of the teacher, and in so doing, limit the possibility of what a great teacher can do when allowed to use their creativity and the wisdom they’ve gained as practicing teachers.

Aristotle (Part 2)

            I’ve been thinking about the implication that Aristotle’s ideas have for education theory and practice so that I can contribute to the conversation on Tuesday. I’ve been looking through articles and highlighting and making notes, then realizing my thoughts are drifting from my original idea into tangential stuff, then stopping to clear my head, then returning to the reading and starting all over again.  I’m sure I won’t get to share all of the ideas and questions that Nicheomachean Ethics presents; I’ll probably be sticking to Aristotle’s influence on Dewey, the various discussions that fall under the “democracy and education” heading, and multicultural education.  But there is one part of the reading that has stuck with me.  Randall Curren touches on it in the afterword. He writes,

“Note well that education is preparation for leisure “spent in intellectual activity,” according to Aristotle.  It is not preparation for work, as is so often now assumed.  Greek education…was from the beginning preparation for leisure….Leisure was, in any case, not equated with mere amusement.  It was contrasted with productive labor in such a way that public service – even military service- was generally considered a use of leisure, or time not spent satisfying material needs.  For Aristotle, leisure provided the opportunity to flourish as a human being or to pursue what is intrinsically, not just instrumentally, good.

How far we’ve moved from this!  I think about students tracked into vocational programs who are deprived of even the opportunity to decide if that path is the one they want to travel. They are often the least consulted and most patronized when educational decisions are being made.  But in a larger sense, I don’t know of many people who don’t suffer from the distance education policy has put between school and the “leisure” that Aristotle described, no matter what their social position. Most American people think of the link between education and work (and the economic competitiveness of the US) as if it has always been that way, and now that the “sorting mechanism” that our education system has been is being questioned by some (http://www.racetonowhere.com/), I wonder if we’ll start looking for alternatives. (Probably not, as the idea that America should always be able “the best” is a hard one for some folks to let go of, but it doesn’t hurt to think about some different ways…)

Nichomachean Ethics

            In Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle explores the good and happiness. He discusses what their defining characteristics are, how people attain them, to what extent it is even possible to attain them, their relationship to virtue, their relationship to knowledge, their relationship to character and morality, their relationship to education and, as the discussion ended, their relationship to society, which, I think, will extend into Politics.

            Because the writing is so dense, I found it really hard to understand at times.  There were lots of middle sections that confused me, and one feature of the writing that made me pause time and again was the tendency for there to be drawn-out explanations for some points, and mere recollection of consensus for others. What I mean is, phrases like, “Surely, one would agree that…” or “…it is absurd to assume that…” seem to pop up a lot (in this piece and in others we’ve read).  I understand that is sometimes done because a point has already been expounded upon earlier, and there’s no need to explain it again, but there are instances when I think the philosophers take for granted things that could be argued differently.  Of course, that’s the purpose of having a stance and defending it: you use prior knowledge and assumptions based on that knowledge to make points. But what are interesting to me are the instances when what is assumed is just as interesting as what’s being argued.  When the discussion in Nichomachean Ethics moves toward man’s actions and the degree to which something is right or wrong, Aristotle writes about how ridiculous it is to think that “there is a mean, an excess, and a deficiency in an unjust or a cowardly or a self-indulgent act” (p116).  He then continues to expound on his point.  You could have an entire conversation about the relativity of right and wrong before finishing that section on virtue, one that would be just as informative and important for the following sections, and yet a totally different point is being argued.

            Later on in the piece, Aristotle writes, “For just as legal traditions and [national] character prevail in states, so paternal words and ancestral habits prevail in households – and the latter have even greater authority because of the ties of kinship and of benefits rendered, [for members of a household] have the requisite natural affection and obedience [toward the father] to start with” (p130).  Do they?  Aristotle is making an argument about education and how it should be “done”, whether access to it should be given to the few or to many, which is one of the most important debates to be had, but embedded in that argument are assumptions about family life and the roles of men and women and “who leads”, which are just as compelling, in my view.  I’m guessing this is where critical perspectives enter the debate, to bring to the forefront not only the obvious questions, but the varying positions from which we pose those questions.

Plato's Republic

In The Republic, Plato sets out to define justice. To do this, he and those he converses with describe the construction of a great city. By imaginatively “building” this city and examining its party, they believe that they will be able to determine what makes it just or unjust. Following this “construction”, they think they can understand what makes a single person just or unjust, because the same qualities that make a person’s city just or unjust make a person so.


Because the group reasons that individuals are not entirely self-sufficient, the city, which starts out as a small group of people, becomes more and more populated. These people must be able to perform certain tasks very well, and do them for others as well as themselves. Farmers must be willing and able to provide food for themselves and the citizens, clothiers must be able to make garments for themselves and the citizens, and so on. This is necessary for the “collective good” a theme which carries throughout the piece.

The thinkers reason that there are groups of people who are necessary for the survival and thrust of the city: guardians, money-makers and the military. What is more; it is only when these people are focusing on their specific tasks (i.e. making money, protecting the city through military activity or governance) that the city functions in a just manner. Throughout the piece, there are many questions asked to get the philosophers (and, of course, the reader) closer to a more complete definition of justice and what just people and social groups looks like. Among them are:

• How should the guardians of a city be educated?

• How should they pass on knowledge?

• What is appropriate/inappropriate for them to teach?

• What should be taught to result in certain outcomes (academic, personality) from students?

The philosophers eventually use to the allegory of the cave to discuss what constitutes knowledge, and the disposition people have towards learning and sharing information, especially when it challenges all that they have known before.

What is most compelling to me, however, is how the thinkers never move far away from the idea that only when people are “in harmony” with themselves, and then “in harmony” with their fellow citizens is the city thriving, no matter how well people are educated (443c “The truth being that justice is…”). Or rather, the goal of education and “rearing” is to give a person the tools necessary to do the tasks they are most suited to do (?) If people are not doing the tasks that align with their talents, then they are not acting as “themselves”, and thus are not able to do the most good for the most people. The point of the governance of the city is not to make only one group of citizens happy, but to make the most that can be, happy. And justice is served when people are doing their own work well, not the work of others. How do we feel about this as educators, and if it’s agreeable, how do we present that idea to others with balance, not tipping the scale too far the side of individualism, or the opposite, encouraging people only to take on work that is beneficial to the group without contemplating what is satisfying on a personal level?

Plato's Meno

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates and Meno converse in an attempt to define virtue. The conversation is, I think, a larger attempt to understand whether what we call characteristics or personality traits are taught, are cultivated over time, or are natural parts of human beings.


I haven’t read the work of these Greek philosophers in a long time, and this piece, besides being provocative, was somewhat amusing. I’m not sure if this is a by-product of translation, or if I understood the tone incorrectly, but while reading certain parts of the text, I thought I was reading a really sophisticated version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” But wordplay, though interesting, is not the main focus of the piece.

Socrates wants define virtue, because he reasons that you cannot know if a trait is taught, cultivated or inherent unless you know exactly what that trait is. The two men discover that there are many virtues, but virtue in itself is a harder thing to define. First, they suggest that it is the ability to rule over someone or something justly, then that is the ability to want good things and attain them. They also posit that virtue could be knowledge. At the end of Meno, the two men conclude that virtue is bestowed upon men by the divine, and cannot be taught, nor is it natural. This conclusion raises important issues about education’s purpose and practice.

If virtue can’t be taught, not even by virtuous people among us, then the purpose of education cannot be to produce virtuous people or a virtuous society, right? Of course, there are many who say that the purpose of education is to socialize people, to prepare them for their socioeconomic station, to make them workers able to preserve this nation’s economic competitiveness. There are those who say that education is the process by which we make citizens. And for all of those things, one could argue, it is not necessary to be virtuous. You could be knowledgeable, capable of “acquiring good things” and ruling over others all without being virtuous (or intentional), according to the dialogues.

So what, then, is the purpose of education? In an American context, or in the context of nations that dominate most of the capital in the world, education’s purpose is to maintain control of the world economy, to the extent to which that’s possible. However, there are alternatives to this ideology all over the world. In many places, especially those not in the global north or west, a large part of education’s purpose is to encourage a self-determining society, one not at the whim of economic superpowers that view culture as merely one of the commodities that’s fresh for the taking in places like South America, parts of Asia and Africa. I think that sort of education is virtuous. And perhaps virtue cannot be completely taught, but virtuous ways of living can be: way that show respect for others, respect for the earth and its resources, etc.

One quote that really resonated with me in Meno was from 81e on page 11 in Philosophy of Education. It reads,

“Seeing then that the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has beheld all things in this world and the world beyond, there is nothing it has not learnt: so it is not surprising that it can be reminded of virtue and other things which it knew before.”

I think that education could be the process by which we remind each other of what is virtuous. It could be the way in which we share knowledge to ensure that more and more people can live with dignity. But is that possible in school communities given the context we’re in?